It was a humid day in Chennai with sweat beads on foreheads, cacophony and people wrapping up the busy week. But that didn’t stop them from pouring in good numbers for the “The Video Editors’ Toolbox” presented by AnimationXpress in association with Adobe, on 11 May at Hotel Green Park, Chennai and making the event a successful one.
Organised for video editors, film editors and industry artists, the event was designed to address the need for fast pacing work and keeping the professionals updated with the softwares and technology, and at the same time making their job easier with upgraded options with the aid of Adobe Premiere Pro.
The event was declared open by AnimationXpress founder, CEO and editor-in-chief Anil Wanvari who welcomed the speakers and attendees, beside highlighting the importance of a video or a film editor who shape up a film and “turn a fabric into a beautiful piece of cloth”. He also thanked the Adobe team for associating with AnimationXpress to organise such useful seminars for the industry workers.
The first speakers lined up for the day were Vijay TV senior manager for system engineering Ashwin Sripathi and supervisor editor Kamals Roshan. They talked about using Premiere Pro for the past four years after they decided to make it big on digital platforms. During interaction with attendees, they revealed that it has reduced their work pressure as it is faster, easier and has smoothened the workflow. “It’s a great tool to use. We actually got more time to schedule our work because previously when there was digitising we used to wait for the footages to come in, and now with everything being done digitally, someone else manages the footage and we’re always ready to edit them,” Ashwin and Kamals quoted, jointly.
They further added that Premiere Pro is very free hand and user friendly, enabling one to easily work on overlays and maintain the formats in comparison to the earlier softwares. There the entire process of transforming the footages into the system for them to edit, was much time consuming. “After getting Premiere Pro, we actually don’t have to get in interactions with producers about what cameras and formats we use, (as Premiere supports most of the current cameras and formats) because now we’re not worried about transcoding, so once the footage comes we can start editing immediately,” they revealed.
When questioned about their training process to editors, Roshan replied, “We get invited to a lot of seminars. After that Ashwin and myself have small sessions with editors and discuss what we have come to know and learnt from there. So we reach to an equilibrium with their questions answered and doubts cleared.” Ashwin concluded their session by supporting his partner’s words- “Once it’s done, we start implementing our learning and begin working on the software. People at Adobe are very friendly and are very prompt with solutions, especially Chetan. It’s easier to work on Premiere Pro for it involves less confusion and better clarity.”
Up next was Adobe South Asia senior solution consultant Guru Vaidya, the session that attendees were eagerly looking forward to. Vaidya spoke about the new features and improvements that have been added to Premiere Pro, explaining in detail about the latest add-ons and how to utilise them. He started by sharing a piece of information about Alfred Hitchcock, one of the most influential names in the world of cinema and his mastery of editing. He continued about how video editing is an integral part of the film industry now and also highlighted on the fact that with the world going digital, “people have become more adventurous, they tend to shoot a lot more. So the problem becomes to manage all these materials and that’s where Premiere Pro comes in”.
Understanding the plight that video editors face daily, he started by enquiring about how many of the Chennai professionals are aware of Premiere Pro and its uses. He then explained how with the help of the software, users can resolve their issues in multiple ways. The audience got their queries answered to their content and also regarding the nitty gritties of the software.
“Premiere has been around for quite some time now, almost 32 years. And it’s only in the last 10 years that it has made big strides in the editing space, and the reason why it happened was because, six-seven years ago the industry was going through a major change. Tape based works changed to digital and suddenly there was no more capturing or DTR but just copy pasting your clips and it became a lot more convenient. Adobe saw that opportunity, with the shift from analog to digital, to make Premiere shine as it was new and nobody has used it before,” Vaidya informed.
In 2010, Adobe decided that they want Premiere to be for videos what Photoshop is to images. To do that they did three things which made maximum number of video professionals shift to Premiere Pro. From producing raw support to whatever digital camera they use to bring the clips natively, saving them the hassle of creating proxies and then editing it, and addressing particular hardwares that have become cheaper over the years. Unlike Avid, Adobe is all about software and thus they try their best to cater to the needs of their customers.
Navigating effortlessly through the software, Vaidya demonstrated several tricks and tips about the new features in Adobe Premiere Pro, from adding cinematic visual effects with Adobe after effects CC with some motion graphics, to make the audience witness some magic that Adobe has introduced in Adobe Audition CC to remove noise from audio -video files and even created his own audio and video mixes, using Adobe SpeedGrade CC to colour correct video and adding unique looks to a video.
The audience were quite impressed with the way Vaidya enthusiastically showed the techniques to go about the software and endowed him with applause at regular intervals. Vaidya pulled down the curtains on his session by saying that they envisioned Premiere Pro in such a way so that it helps the professionals to put their best foot forward, “One can’t only be an editor now. One has to understand how graphics work, how auditioning works. We have tried to make Premiere Pro the most useful tool kit for delivering an entire film.”
The final speaker for event was Arun Ezilmaivannam, film editor from Chennai. He connected well with the audience by communicating and imaparting his experience, knowledge about the field and the Adobe software in their local language. It turned out to be an enriching experience with more interactions. He informed, “After 2013, most of the online softwares started accepting AAF and XMLs. So in Adobe we also have an option AAF where multiple layers, frame rates are supported and can be worked on simultaneously.”
He also shared his previous experience about working on Premiere Pro where he could customise, innovate and save a lot of time. He ended his session by complimenting AnimationXpress for taking the initiative to come to South India and educate more video and film editors about the upgradations and usefulness of Adobe’s Premiere Pro.
The programme ended with Anil Wanvari taking to the stage and urging the attendees to introduce themselves and share their feedbacks about the knowledge sharing session. The audience reciprocated positively and shared their gratitude for having been benefited much from the event. They also got a chance to interact with the speakers and the peers at the event which opened new arenas of ideation for them. The speakers were felicitated by Mr Wanvari with the book Creativity Inc. penned by Amy Wallace and Edwin Catmull.
Adobe India marketing specialist Sourabh Chenni delivered the vote of thanks and appreciated the participation of the audience. “We loved the energy of the crowd. This gives us the enthusiasm to conduct such events. We look forward to host more knowledge sharing sessions,” he noted.
With a fascinating response from the attendees, AnimationXpress and Adobe look forward to more such events and interactive sessions with the industry artists, professionals and creative geniuses with greater participation because the motto of AnimationXpress is to -“educate, engage and entertain”.
